pictures of our damage

Lawrence and I visited the church facility this morning and took some pictures. We figured you guys might be interested in seeing what kind of damage we have sustained. Overall, it is not nearly as bad as it could be...I guess. We can get our facility to a place where it is usable fairly easily, but we will still have a good bit of work to do. So here is an overview of what we found:

Front Building
When you drive up, the first thing that you notice is that the fence on both sides is pretty badly damaged. Most of it is down. I don't know how much of the fence is actually our property and how much belongs to our neighbors. Here is a small slice of what it looks like:


The trees in the front are in fairly good condition. Here is one small tree that is down (as you can see from the below picture) and some fairly sizeable limbs. Both of the front lightpoles are down:


The gate that leads into the children's play area is damaged, as well as the fence on that side:


As you head over to the back side of the front building, you see some trees down:


It appears that someone tried to break in. A window was broken out with a brick as you see below. Nothing was taken. Clayton took the initiative to cover up the glass last week (yeah, Clayton!).


The major water stain inside is in the corner room in the nursery:


On the outside, you can see how a ton of shingles are missing right above that room. The two "peaks" are the only part of the roof with damage...and they are the only parts that were not part of the major roofing project that occured a couple of months ago.


Back Building
As you move to the back building, you see a couple of trees down there as well:


Some of the siding is torn up pretty badly. You can see the light coming through the holes on the inside below. This is probably the biggest immediate need...to cover up these holes so that water doesn't get into the gym.


On the other side of the building, there is a large piece of rubble that appears to have flown off of one of the next door apartment buildings. You see that big dent in the side of the building? It appears that the rubble hit the building there and then fell into these four AC units, knocking one of them completely over:


In the kitchen, there is some water damage to the ceiling. We could not figure out where this water got in:


Well, that is the "highlights." Needless to say, there is more damage than this. It seems that the first project for the "chainsaw brigade" will be to cut up all of those trees down on the church property. I think I counted six in all.

Keep us in your prayers. I think that we will have the building in good enough condition to start housing work teams before the end of the month. Yeah!

Doug